The queue or cue is a hairstyle, frequently used in reference to men, in which the hair is worn long and gathered up into a ponytail, often braided. It was worn traditionally by the Manchu people of Manchuria and certain Native American groups.

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Jurchen men wore their hair in queues like their Manchu descendants. In 1126 the Jurchen initially ordered male Han within their conquered territories to adopt Jurchen hairstyle by shaving the front of their heads and to adopt Jurchen dress, but the order was lifted.[1] Jurchen were impersonated by Han rebels who wore their hair in the Jurchen "pigtail" to strike fear within their population.[2]

A European artist's conception of a Manchu warrior in China - surprisingly, holding the severed head of an enemy by its queue. Later historians have noted the queue looking more like a Ukrainian Cossackchupryna as an inconsistency in the picture. (From the cover of Martino Martini's Regni Sinensis a Tartari devastati enarratio, 1661.)

The Manchu hairstyle was forcefully introduced to Han Chinese in the early 17th century during the Manchu conquest of China. Nurhaci of the Aisin Gioro clan declared the establishment of the Later Jin dynasty, later becoming the Qing dynasty of China, after Ming dynasty forces in Liaodong defected to his side. The Ming General of Fushun, Li Yongfang, defected to Nurhaci after Nurhaci promised him rewards, titles, and Nurhaci's own granddaughter in marriage. Other Han Chinese Generals in Liaodong proceeded to defect with their armies to Nurhaci and were given women from the Aisin Gioro family in marriage. Once firmly in power, Nurhaci commanded all men in the areas he conquered to adopt the Manchu hairstyle.

The Manchu hairstyle was significant because it was a symbol of Han submission to Qing rule. The queue also aided the Manchus in identifying those Han who refused to accept Qing dynasty domination.

The hairstyle was compulsory for all males and the penalty for not complying was execution for treason. In the early 1910s, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese no longer had to wear it. Some, such as Zhang Xun, still did as a tradition, but most of them abandoned it after the last Emperor of China, Puyi, cut his queue in 1922.[7]

In 1644 Beijing was sacked by a coalition of rebel forces led by Li Zicheng, a minor Ming dynasty official turned leader of the peasant revolt. The Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide when the city fell, marking the official end of the Ming dynasty. The Han Chinese Ming general Wu Sangui and his army then defected to the Qing and let them through Shanhai pass, and then seized control of Beijing, overthrowing Li's short-lived Shun dynasty. They then forced Han Chinese to adopt the queue as a sign of submission.[13]

A year later, after the Qing armies had reached South China, on 21 July 1645 Dorgon issued an edict ordering all Han men to shave their foreheads and braid the rest of their hair into a queue identical to those of the Manchus.[14] The Han Chinese were given 10 days to comply or face death. Although Dorgon admitted that followers of Confucianism might have grounds for objection, most Han officials cited the Ming dynasty's traditional System of Rites and Music as their reason for resistance. This led Dorgon to question their motives: "If officials say that people should not respect our Rites and Music, but rather follow those of the Ming, what can be their true intentions?"[13]

The slogan adopted by the Qing was "Keep your hair and lose your head, or keep your head and cut your hair" (Chinese: 留髮不留頭，留頭不留髮; pinyin: liúfàbùliútóu,liútóubùliúfà).[15] The Han Chinese people resisted the order and the Manchu rulers struck back with deadly force, massacring all who refused to obey. Rebels in Shandong tortured to death the official who suggested the queue order to Dorgon, and killed his relatives.[16]

Li Chengdong, a Han Chinese general who had served the Ming but defected to the Qing,[17] ordered troops to carry out three separate massacres in the city of Jiading within a month, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. At the end of the third massacre, there was hardly any living person left in this city.[18] The three massacres at Jiading District is one of the most infamous, with estimated death tolls in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.[19]Jiangyin also held out against about 10,000 Qing troops for 83 days. When the city wall was finally breached on 9 October 1645, the Qing army led by the Han Chinese Ming defector Liu Liangzuo (劉良佐), who had been ordered to "fill the city with corpses before you sheathe your swords," massacred the entire population, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people.[20] The imposition of this order was not uniform; it took up to 10 years of martial enforcement for all of China to be brought into compliance.

The queue was the only aspect of Manchu culture which the Qing forced on the common Han population. The Qing required people serving as officials to wear Manchu clothing, but allowed non-official Han civilians to continue wearing Hanfu (Han clothing).

Since the Qing dynasty grouped Muslims by language, they grouped the Han Hui (currently known as Hui people) with Han Chinese since both of them spoke Chinese, and made them wear the queue. Turkic Muslims, like the Uyghur and Salar people, did not have to wear the queue.[21]

However, after an invasion of Kashgar by Jahangir Khoja, Turkistani Muslim begs and officials in Xinjiang eagerly fought for the "privilege" of wearing a queue to show their steadfast loyalty to the Empire. High ranking begs were granted this right.[22]

The purpose of the Queue Order was to demonstrate loyalty to the Qing and, conversely, growing one's hair came to symbolize revolutionary ideals, such as during the White Lotus Rebellion; the Taiping Rebellion being called the Long hairs (長毛) or Hair rebels (髮逆).[23]

Han Chinese resistance to adopting the queue was widespread and bloody. The Chinese in the Liaodong Peninsula rebelled in 1622 and 1625 in response to the implementation of the mandatory hairstyle. The Manchus responded swiftly to this rebellion by killing the educated elite and instituting a stricter separation between Han Chinese and Manchus.[24]

In 1645, the adoption of the queue was taken a step further by the ruling Manchus when it was decreed that any man who did not adopt the Manchu hairstyle within ten days would be executed. The intellectual Lu Xun summed up the Chinese reaction to the implementation of the mandatory Manchu hairstyle by stating, "In fact, the Chinese people in those days revolted not because the country was on the verge of ruin, but because they had to wear queues." In 1683 Zheng Keshuang surrendered and queued.[24]

Neither Taoist priests nor Buddhist monks were subjected to wearing the queue by the Qing; they continued to wear their traditional hairstyles, which was shaving off all the hair and going bald for Buddhist monks, and growing hair long and wearing it in the traditional Chinese topknot for Taoist priests.[29][30][31][32][33]

The Manchus' willingness to impose the queue and their dress style on the men of China, and their success in suppressing the resistance, was viewed as an example to emulate by some foreign observers. H. E. M. James, a British administrator in India, wrote in 1887 that the British rulers ought to act in a similarly decisive way imposing their will in India. In his view, the British administrators should have outlawed the suttee much earlier than they actually did (1829), and in James' own day they should have acted as severely against Indian journalists expressing opposition to the British rule.[34]

British soldiers and sailors during the 18th century wore their hair in a style known as the queue. While not always braided, the hair was similarly pulled back very tight into a single tail, but was wrapped around a piece of leather and tied down with a ribbon. The hair was also often greased and powdered in a fashion similar to powdered wigs, or tarred in the case of sailors. It was said that the soldiers' hair had to be pulled back so tightly that they had difficulty closing their eyes afterwards. The use of white hair powder in the British Army was discontinued in 1796 and queues were ordered to be cut off four years later.[35] They continued to be worn in the Royal Navy for a while longer, where they were known as "pigtails". Officers wore pigtails until 1805 and other ranks continued to wear them until about 1820.[36]

In the 18th century, European soldiers styled their traditionally long hair into a queue called the "soldier's queue" (Soldatenzopf), which was previously only allowed for nobleOfficers. That hairstyle first became mandatory in the Prussian Army and several other Holy Roman Empire's states' forces under Frederick William I of Prussia. An artificial or "patent" queue was issued to recruits whose hair was too short to plait. The style was abolished in the Prussian army in 1807.[37]